If Rocket Man Musk Delivers, The Robot Car Will Be Here By 2018

Elon Musk wasted no time dropping one of his trademark bombshells in a press conference before the North American International Auto Show: In 24-36 months, it should be possible to electronically “summon” your Tesla from anywhere to anywhere and the car will handle the driving. He was discussing the feature in the context of a new software update for existing vehicles that allows you to have your car open the garage, pull itself out and be ready for you to step in, but the implications of this are staggering. Today “summoning” is limited to 39 feet, perhaps the distance to your front door. But when the range restriction can safely be removed, Tesla vehicles will be fully autonomous and capable of driving without a human at the controls — theoretically anywhere.

Look ma, no hands: Tesla’s prototype charger can literally plug itself in for unattended charging.

This is a stronger variant of remarks Musk made a few weeks back and his language this time contained some fascinating new thoughts. First, he talked about summoning your car from New York to Los Angeles. Of course, that scenario is absurd under normal circumstances — unless you were actually taking a cross-country trip in it yourself. Musk started to worry about the implications of laws surrounding self-driving cars differing across state lines: “It would get pretty weird if the car’s behavior has to change when it crosses a state border,” he said.

He was also complimentary of California for taking leadership in trying to craft regulations to support the development of autonomous vehicles. (Though Musk didn’t mention it, Nevada is also an early leader in this respect and happens to be home to Tesla’s battery Gigafactory.)

Musk also explained that recharging of Tesla batteries wasn’t going to require any tedious human effort like actually getting out of your car to plug them in. After all, if you did summon your car from 3000 miles away, who would do that? Teslademonstrated a sci-fi like charging cable last August that was both astonishing and terrifying. “We will try to make it look less creepy,” Musk said. “It’s sort of fascinating in its creepiness. We will probably roll it out first in the Superchargers, and see how that goes.”

In the meantime, the company has been getting more serious about how its Autopilot technology works. It has modified the software in the latest release to stop owners from using it on city streets or on undivided roads (where Tesla doesn’t believe it’s currently safe enough). It also has limited maximum velocity to 5 miles per hour over the speed limit and started having the car slow while taking curves, as human drivers would do. In prior iterations, the car took curves at full speed because the computerized driving could manage. That would have odd effects on other drivers on the road, not to mention lowering the margin of safety overall.